I wrote the book in latex, and so I wrote special purpose code to convert the latex to html (although I did use bibtex2html for the references). In retrospect, I probably should instead have started with the output of latex2html on everything and then modified the output.

I put a lot of thought into whether to break the text up into chapters or sections, because I didn’t want each page too long but I wanted the context retained. I think chapters works best in the end, and it helps a lot with the cross-referencing. I broke the text up into sections for the search tool, though.

I was a bit concerned about having comments appear on the chapters, as that text is frozen and should always look the same, so I decided on a link from the chapter pages to comment pages on the blog. We’ll see if that works or not. I did make a category for each chapter. I could also do it for sections but I think that is overkill.

I had to learn a bit of php to use the search tool I ended up with (because the hosting service I chose works best with php). This is also my first exposure to wordpress, and I still need to improve how it is integrated into the rest of the site. I also realize the intro pages need work to draw people in, including some posts from the blog eventually.

The graphic design took a long time. I wanted to make it readable, and not too website-ish. I’m glad you like the outcome!

Will you do a post on the ‘making of’ the book website? I’m quite impressed with how well it reads as a web-book: great images, great tables, etc. How did you manage to create such a create book website and a book too?